Winter
- You know we're going to get around to looking at everything near Tinker Creek eventually, so here's what we're looking at now: starlings.
- There was once a guy named Eugene Schieffelin, a rich drug manufacturer (the legit kind) who wanted to introduce all the birds in Shakespeare's work to America. To this end, he imported a bunch of starlings from Europe and released them in Central Park.
- The people of Virginia aren't too happy about this, because starlings are taking over the place.
- In January 1972, the city of Radford, Virginia had had enough of the stinky birds. Citizens tried shooting them with shotguns, but there were too many.
- Radford officials and biologists got together and decided the thing to do was shoot the starlings with detergent foam.
- This is pretty grim, so you might want to cover your eyes and read the next part through your fingers.
- The way the foam worked was that the detergent washed away the waterproof coating from the starlings' feathers. Then, left exposed to the elements in winter, they'd get wet and freeze to death.
- (We told you it wasn't pretty.)
- However, the temperatures didn't drop enough the night they sprayed the starlings, and most of the birds survived.
- Now it's winter again, and Annie spends most of her time writing indoors. However, she still goes out to look at stuff.
- At dusk every evening, a giant flock of starlings takes to the sky, and she finds the sight beautiful.
- She pontificates for a while about human beings and how weird they are. The silly, dumb news stories in the paper are, well, silly and dumb.
- One day there's a story in the paper about a guy in the Forest Service in Wisconsin freeing a duck frozen to the ice by chopping the ice around its feet with an ax.
- It makes her think of a decidedly more gruesome story a guy named Thomas McGonigle told her. You might want to cover your eyes again.
- When McGonigle's dad was young, he used to see herring gulls frozen to the ice off Long Island, so he'd chop the living birds at the ankles, and his family ate gull all winter.
- Yes, this meant there were gull feet with bloody stumps that remained on the ice.
- And now for a story about Eskimos catching wolves.
- The Eskimos rubbed blubber on their knives and stuck them into the ice. Wolves would come along, lick the blubber off the knives, slice their tongues, and bleed to death.
- Annie reads this stuff all winter. Strangely, she likes it, and she worries she'll read all the books, run out, and have to learn about wildflowers to keep herself entertained.
- Now we're going to talk about snow.
- Annie's getting a little wigged out by how the white reflects the sun, which makes the snow look lighter than the sky, but an illuminated thing can't be lighter than the thing that illuminates it. The illusion makes her feel like she's walking upside down on the sky.
- Like, whoa, dude.
- She goes out and looks around. (Do we even need to tell you this anymore? Just assume that she's always out looking around.)
- She sees a coot on the creek. No, not an old guy; a black-and-gray bird that looks kind of like a duck.
- Annie decides to stand very still and pretend to be a tree so she won't scare the bird away—this way, she can get a better look at it.
- She starts to wonder if it might be a decoy, so she waves at it; the bird responds by eating a plant.
- The thing to do, she reasons, might be to throw a snowball at it and kill it. Huh…
- We go off on some pontification about hibernation. The way ladybugs do it is pretty cool—they form basketball-sized bug clusters.
- You know how you can mail order ladybugs for your garden to eat aphids? The way they get them is by taking a bug basketball and packing it in a bunch of pinecones. The ladybugs crawl into the pinecones, which act like all-natural packing peanuts, allowing the bugs to survive the shipping.
- It's about time something survived in this chapter. Sheesh.
- Dillard talks about how people at Tinker Creek love to talk about the weather. Then she talks about spiders, which are invading her bathroom and building webs on her coffee cups.
- So yeah, creatures are either coming in or falling asleep for the winter. That's how it works at Tinker Creek.